Contents:

The paper focuses on the existing connection between price formation decisions and the standards of financial adjustment of the Brazilian big industrial companies. It discusses the impact of the transition from the eighties to the nineties in corporate funding standards. The link between the mark up changes and funding decisions is underlined. The eighties was marked by a situation of high levels of industrial protection, a rigid external credit constraint and high inflation. The key environmental changes during the nineties, by contrast, can, in short, be described as consequences of the reconnection of the main domestic credit takers in the international financial markets, the drastic drop on the level of protection given to domestic producers and, starting from 1994, the stabilization process. The defensive behavior of firms under the high inflation regime and closed economy materialized as an upper bias in price decisions. The perceived risk of capital loss in a highly unstable environment pushed up the industrial mark-ups. The upper bias in the mark up decision under high inflation was linked to a defensive tendency of companies to move away from any kind of financial debt in the liability side of balance sheets ? decreasing the leverage standards throughout the eighties. During the 1990/93 period, the reinsertion in international capital flows was combined with the reduction in protection levels. That situation slowed down the high inflation defensive tendency to push up mark-ups. After stabilization, some of the mechanisms that shaped the defensive behavior of firms were deactivated. The combination of open economy, high volumes of external credit, stabilization and real exchange rate appreciation put a restrictive pressure in the levels of industrial mark-ups and changed the disposition of firms to assume different forms of debt ? slowly reshaping the composition of the liability side of balance sheets.

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